Brazil's president strives to calm protests

SAO PAULO — President Dilma Rousseff proposed a wide range of actions to reform Brazil’s political system, fight corruption and improve public services — all demands angrily asked for by the millions of protesters who’ve taken to the streets the past week.

In a meeting Monday with four leaders of a main group behind the protest movement and later with governors and the mayors of 26 capital cities, Rousseff shifted some of the burden for progress onto the back of Brazil’s widely loathed congress — in particular, in calling for a plebiscite on political reform that only lawmakers have the authority to call.

Rousseff told the governors and mayors that the government would allocate $23 billion for new spending on urban public transport, but she didn’t provide details on what the new projects would be. The four leaders of the free-transit activist group that launched the first demonstrations more than a week ago said she also gave them no concrete plans.

“I mainly want to repeat that my government is listening to democratic voices. We must learn to hear the voices of the street,” Rousseff told the governors and mayors. “We all must, without exception, understand these signals with humility and accuracy.”

She said her government would focus on five priorities: fiscal responsibility and controlling inflation; political reform; health care; public transport; and education.

Protesters have filled cities across this vast country to air a wide spectrum of grievances including poor public services and the high cost of hosting next year’s World Cup soccer tournament and the 2016 Olympics.

Mayara Longo Vivian, one of the leaders of the Free Fare Movement who met with Rousseff in the capital, Brasilia, said that no concrete measures were given to the group and that their “fight would continue.” The movement has been working since 2006 to eliminate public transport fares.

Vivian referred to the billions of dollars Brazil is spending for the World Cup, saying, “If they have money to build stadiums, they have money for zero tariffs” on public transportation.

“The people are on the street, the left is on the street, with legitimate agendas,” she said. “Only with concrete measures from the state will this situation be reversed.”

At a demonstration in Rio de Janeiro on Monday, 68-year-old sociologist Irene Loewenstein said she was not too impressed by Rousseff’s action.

“It’s a necessary first step, but not a particularly meaningful nor surprising one,” she said. “Neither Dilma nor any other politician here is capable of even understanding, much less putting into practice, the kind of systematic change the people are demanding. It’s just not within their worldviews.”

Monday marked the beginning of a more hands-on approach for Rousseff in the face of sharp criticism that she had been too silent during protests last week. She only made brief comments on June 17 and then a 10-minute, pre-recorded nationwide address Friday, a week after the protest exploded and a day after a million people took to the streets in at times violent protests. Many of the means she listed, including using oil royalties to fund education and a program to attract foreign doctors to work in areas underserved by Brazilian physicians, had already been proposed by Rousseff before but met stiff resistance in congress. By putting the issues before the public at this sensitive time, the president is ratcheting up pressure on congress, an institution widely loathed by the population, to not serve as a bottleneck for the proposals.

Opposition politicians in congress, including a senator who is viewed as her biggest rival for next year’s presidential election, blasted Rousseff’s call for a plebiscite on political reform.

“It’s the specific jurisdiction of congress to call a plebiscite,” said Sen. Aecio Neves. “To divert attention, she’s transferring to congress a privilege that is already ours and isn’t responding to the expectations of the population.”

Some scattered protests flared Monday, and two women died after being hit by a car as they tried to block a highway in the state of Goias near the nation’s capital. The highway patrol in Goias said the driver fled and was being sought.

Protests in Sao Paulo state blocked road access to the nation’s largest port in Santos, causing a huge backlog of trucks trying to unload products. In Brasilia, a group of about 300 students protesting against corruption blocked some streets.

The protests have hit as the nation hosts the Confederations Cup soccer tournament, seen as a warm-up for the World Cup.

Experts said the protesters, though mostly disorganized, were in control thanks to support from the majority of Brazilians as seen in recent polls. That opened a window for concessions on their demands for less corruption and improvements to the nation’s woeful public services.

Complicating matters, though, is Brazil’s worsening economic climate, which Rousseff referred to Monday. The government has been struggling against both a lagging economy and rising inflation, which economists say require contradictory actions to fix. While the nation’s benchmark interest rate could be slashed to stoke economic growth, it could also be raised to keep inflation at bay.

“Brazil will see several waves of protests,” said Guillermo Trejo, a professor at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S., whose research focuses on social protests in Latin America. “This cycle will decline, and it’ll likely return to episodic protests once the media attention of the Confederations Cup goes away.”

But next year could be a bumpy ride as Rousseff faces re-election, Trejo said. Already, the protests have become the largest of their kind in Brazil in at least two decades.

“Presidential elections are always a huge magnet for protests and hosting a major event like the World Cup will open a window for more,” Trejo said.